The technologies, toolkits, and frameworks that are needed to build apps for your smartphone, tablet, computers, or even for websites, have continued to evolve, grow, and get increasingly better in recent years. This has given rise to all kinds of communication apps and technologies on the internet.
Team chat apps, instant messaging, video conferencing, Snapchat, Instagram, FaceTime, Allo, etc. — pretty much everyone out there has tried to redefine communication between people and spin their own take on it. Yet, email still remains one of the basic and fundamental methods of communication available today. Email finds its roots in the early 1970s and since then, hundreds of millions of users use email to communicate with peers, sign up for new accounts, receive newsletters, and more, even today.
This has also led to the rise of the volume of email. A busy person on the internet receives hundreds of emails in his day-to-day life and it becomes very difficult to keep track of what’s important and what to pay attention too. Now, email apps like Spark do help to mitigate this burden by automagically sorting your email for you, but more often than not, a busy person may just ignore many of the emails they get simply by glancing at the email’s subject or just leave it to their mail apps to do the sorting for them. In such cases, any precious time and resources you’ve spent in drafting an email to them are wasted if your email is ignored. What’s more, if they do happen to look at your email and find out that it’s too damn long, it’s very likely that they’ll ignore all your future emails and possibly even hold a grudge against you.
Busy people have very little time for their email, so it’s important to ensure that your email stands out from the rest of the clutter. You need to be fully aware of the best time to send email Here are some useful tips to keep in mind when writing an email to someone busy:
1. Your Email Subject is Everything
The email subject is the first thing anyone sees about your email, after your name. Seasoned email users often train their eyes to first look at the email subject and ignore it if it doesn’t catch their eye. So how do you ensure your email passes this test? Well, for starters, your email subject should be concise. Writing an email subject that is short and to the point helps the receiver quickly deduce how much attention he should be giving the email. If it’s long, irrelevant, and does not convey a gist of the actual email, there’s a very good chance that your email is going to be ignored or deleted.
Email subjects should briefly convey what the email is about. For example, “Million Dollar App Idea” sounds exciting, but no one is going to take that seriously in their busy schedules.
2. Your Email Body is Just as Important
Being concise isn’t just limited to your email subject. If you’ve managed to grab the attention of a busy person and have made him click on your email, an even bigger challenge is to keep him interested in your email body. So keeping your body text concise is just as important.
First and foremost, make sure you come to the point without wasting any time. It is vital that your email should not look like a big block of text. You may feel like explaining something in detail, but the receiver usually has other plans. Use small paragraphs and keep your sentences short. Do not overuse abbreviations, and don’t overdo sentences with commas.
Your emails should read like a short summary, that shouldn’t take more than a minute to read, but that’s often how long someone will spare for your email.
3. Lists are Easier to Read
Even if a busy person decides to look at your email, they’re probably just going to glance through it. So wherever possible, you should always break down your points into short bullet points. Content that is laid down as bullet points is not only easy to read and understand, it also makes your email look less cluttered and less heavy.
Can you imagine reading this article if we hadn’t split each point and instead only offered advice using a giant wall of text? No, of course not.
4. Keep the Greetings Formal, and to a Minimum
At the beginning of any email, we typically greet the person at the other end in different ways such as “Hi” “Hello” “Hey” or sometimes even “Yo!”. Often, this is followed by 3-5 lines of formality wherein we ask how the person has been lately, and what they’ve been up to. When emailing a busy person, it’s important to keep your greetings short and not to overdo them. A busy person will never be interested in all that, so you must always get to the point as soon as you can.
Additionally, when addressing a busy person, remember to always stick to “Hello” or “Hi”, largely depending on who the receiver is. Using anything else is usually a bad idea.
5. Always Personalize the Email
One of the most important things you should always keep in mind is to never mass email the same content to multiple busy persons at the same time. Doing this means your email content to them is often stale and irrelevant, which means the busy person is not going to waste time reading your email.
Instead, personalize your email with things specific to the receiving. You can congratulate them on their recent achievements, enquire about something important to them or simply mention something specific about them or their company.
Doing so ensures that you have their attention (and at times, curiosity) and they’re much more likely to focus on your email later.
If you’re looking to send a follow-up email after a few days, you can use Spark and it’s amazing Reminders feature that automatically reminds you in case you don’t get a reply to a particular email. Nifty, isn’t it?
There you have it. We just recommended five simple suggestions to keep in mind when emailing super busy people. When you follow these tips recommendations and are careful about knowing the best time of day to send email, your emails are more likely to get replies and you’ll have better success using email as a communication tool.
Preshit Deorukhkar 
